Kiva Developers Garage

You probably heard about it through facebook or twitter, but last weekend I participate in the first Kiva Developer Garage. The idea was to promote the launch of their new API, and get a bunch of new projects kick started. Though Im not a developer, I attended to motivate, inspire, and provide some ideas on which direction the apps could take.
In short we had 25+ coders show up and we proposed a handful of general projects:

1) Javascript Loan browser - to make the browsing experience sexier

2) iphone App

3) better Facebook app

4) wordpress plugin

5) google friend connect

My main interests where around the Facebook application and the Wordpress Widget. If we can get to the point that every someone Facebook account makes a loan or gets repaid, they post it back to their news feed, we'd be set. People would learn about the lending and loaning experience through their friends, and would be more comfortable checking out Kiva.org for the first time.

On the wordpress widget, the idea is that many bloggers are out there lending to Kiva and they want to show their kiva street cred. We want to display our portfolios and our stats to the world in the hopes of challenging more people to get involved.

Both of these projects got off to a good start, and once I track the links, I'll post them. In the meantime, here's the video: